Thursday, May 10, 2012

Well, I was just gearing up for a new batch of nereophytes when, literally out of nowhere, I'm informed that the entity hosting my website no longer exists. Just like that, and the website is gone. I can't put into words how disheartening this is.

Thankfully, more than 90% of the material is backed up, so the information is not lost, it's just not public anymore. I'll be spending the next little while figuring out how to move forward with the project.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

The last post in here was in October, and the last post with
immediate relevance to my work with Nereus was more than a month before that. I’m glad to say that, after a semester that—if
it wasn’t from Hell itself, certainly took a page from Hell’s playbook—is finally
over, I’ve been able to devote some serious time to presenting new plants on
the website.

Now, that long hiatus doesn’t mean that I haven’t been
working on nereid plants at all, for
I have taken pockets of time here and there to organize clades and compose
capsules for eventual publication. But
finally I’ve had enough time to devote to illustrations, which I think are a key
component of the success of Nereus, or any similar project. “A picture paints a thousand words,” as it
were, and in the context of xenobiology I’ve found that pictures convey a lot
more information than might apparent. A
capsule on any given imaginary creature may tell me a great deal about the evolutionary
history, noteworthy behavior, or any number of useful details to reinforce the
creature’s plausibility, but an accompanying image can either reinforce that
plausibility or negate it all in an instant.

So I take my images very seriously, and try to use what
skills I can in order to communicate the spirit and flavor of the nereids I
create. Over the years I’ve found that
the illustration process has provided me with great triumphs as well as frustrations,
surprises, and the occasional need to change capsules in order to fit with
things I like in the picture; such has been the case with my first steps into my
presentation of the nereophytes.

Because Coleria is a phylum that functions at a largely
microscopic scale, I had a hard time figuring out exactly how to present them
visually. I started with sea grain, and
a relatively straightforward capsule, but when I started to put together an
illustration for the entry I was just never happy with it. This turned out to be the biggest stumbling
block for my nereophytes so far, because I didn’t want to move on until I could
get that picture done. Well, eventually
I just said the image that’s up for the sea grain is good enough. Maybe one day I’ll redo it, but in the end I
shouldn’t let a presentation of nereid plants be halted by one little genus of
algae.

So far with my nereids, almost all illustrations were
rendered based on 3D models built in SketchUp so that I could explore
biometrics, proportions, and image composition.
It’s been a technique that’s served me well, but after the frustrations
I faced with drawing the sea grain, I decided on a different tactic with the
verebull: a completely hand drawn composition without any preliminary 3D work. While I still think the image for the
verebull could be improved, it came together rather easily. No muss, no fuss, and on to the next one.

Rock paint falls into the category of one of the images that
has surprised me. I used the same
non-SketchUp technique here, penciling some stony backgrounds and adding the
plant life itself in Photoshop. I’m
pleased with how it all turned out, but what surprised me was how the rock
paint actually looks on the rocks. What
I had originally imagined was something more akin to desert lichen in
appearance, but what has come about is something that is more visually
interesting, and may help to paint future landscape images in a more alien
light.

And I’m not sure if that pun was intended or not…

But if the rock paint surprised me, the splashmoss really came
out of nowhere. The original image in my
head was something akin to shelf fungus, but as I sat down with pencil and paper,
something else came out, something that looked more like a rash of pustules
than anything else. At first I thought
about restarting, but since I was on a roll with alien looking plants I decided
to go with it.

At some future date I may come back and see if the drawings
I made are truly plausible, but for the time being I’m pleased with how the
pictures have turned out and I’m willing to follow my initial impression that
what I’ve drawn fits with scientific laws as we know them. I look forward to anyone’s feedback on these
matters, both in terms of the relationship between the capsules and their
illustrations, and of the plausibility of the genera themselves.